Robert Wicksteed had a passion for vintage cars which made him a familiar figure at hill climbs up and down the country.
In a life of immense variety and interest, Robert Wicksteed was variously an engineer, pilot, inventor, racing driver and chairman of the family trust which runs the Wicksteed leisure park near Kettering in Northants. Founded together with the Wicksteed Village Trust, created by his grand father Charles Wicksteed in the l920s, Wicksteed Park is the country’s oldest leisure park.
The trust, originally set up “for the amelioration of the good people of Kettering” also administers Barton Hall and its extensive grounds, an archaeological site of educational interest and a model farm, all of which were under Wicksteed’s overall supervision.
Robert Wicksteed was born in Barnes in 1920, and educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, from where, in 1939, he took up a student engineering apprenticeship with Peter Brotherhood in Peterborough. He had also enlisted in the Territorial Army and after war broke out he went to France with The Northamptonshire Regiment as part of the British Expeditionary Force.
Robert's war in uniform was to be relatively brief. He was attached to battalion HQ on intelligence duties, but in the confusion that followed the German break through he found himself in charge of a party of stragglers, mainly from his regiment. After leading this party of soldiers to the Dunkirk beaches he was evacuated along with them. Back in England his engineering skills were deemed to be of greater value to the war effort than his abilities as a soldier, and he was sent back to Peter Brotherhood where he worked in the naval engineering department. For the rest of the war he was engaged on projects connected with warship and submarine design and construction. At the end of the war he joined his grandfather’s firm, Charles Wicksteed, which was, in those days of austerity, one the few designing and making leisure playground equipment, in which it had carved out a lucrative market, with customers all over the world.
Interesting though this commercial success was, it did not give Wicksteed the outlet for his engineering ideas that he wanted. So he left for the research and development department of Stewarts and Lloyds, which was developing special steels. He subsequently ran a couple of companies of his own: Hartington Conway and Spiro Engineering, the former making specialist roof lights, the latter enabling him to try out some of the ideas that were dear to him. Among these was a commercial bread-buttering machine which had its uses in the catering facilities of the Wicksteed leisure park. He had become a trustee of Wicksteed Village after the war and was from the early 1950s its chairman.
He was interested in sports of every kind: athletic, team, winter and motor sports. He played hockey to county standard and in 1954 went down the Cresta run. An old friend, Jack Linnell, director of Sywell Airfield, introduced him to the pleasures of flying and their families had many holidays abroad. This led to vintage car racing. In 1924 Linnell had bought the Alvis No1 racing car, the first of three made to compete in the 1923 Brooklands race which Alivis won. Linnell went on to race the car in Brooklands in the 1920s. In the l960s Wicksleed took over the competition driving of the car (which then became known as the Linnell-Wicksteed Alvis) and at the end of he decade supervised its restoration to its pristine state of racing glory. In the l970s he regularly drove it in vintage classes in hill climbs at Prescott and Shelsley Wash, as well as in vintage races at such venues ac Donnington, Cadwell Park and Silverstone. In August 1973 he and the Alvis set the fastest climb for the class at Prescott and three years later at Shelslev Wash he set a vintage record of 49.20 seconds, beating many cars that were both far younger and larger. Towards the end of the decade he capped his performances with yet another vintage hill climb record of 48.5 seconds at Shelsley Wash.
Robert always liked to drive the car to and from the circuits at which he was competing. Only a serious crash at Cadwell Park in the 1980s indicated that he ought to be thinking of bringing his racing career to an end. This was confirmed when the Alvis’s engine blew up when be was returning from Silverstone in 1983. Thereafter the car, which Linnell, who died in July 1983, had by then gifted to him, was retired to lighter duties. Even so, Wicksteed had always to be ready for unforeseeable eventualities. On one occasion he was driving the car on ceremonial duties at Sywell when a light aircraft, coming in to land, got its approach spectacularly wrong and landed on top of the Alvis and a Rover that was parked adjacent to it. On that occasion the older car stood up to the impact far better than either the aircraft or the Rover. Both were write-offs while the Alvis merely suffered a broken half shaft.
Robert’s wife Dorene died in 2000. He is survived by a son and two daughters.
Robert Wicksteed, engineer, inventor and businessman, was born on July 19, 1920. He died on July 1, 2003 aged 82.
